The Haunted Hoard: Tales from Candleforth (PS5)

The short puzzle solving point-and-click Tales from Candleforth is a bit like a Grimm fairy tale but with the creepiness amplified quite intentionally. With a storybook look and a humble rural setting to contrast the magical dangers being tapped into, Tales from Candleforth quite aptly embodies the folk horror feel it is angling for, aiming mostly for quiet eeriness with only a few moments where things get surprisingly dark in a hurry. The look and tone are its greatest weapons, but this hand-drawn tale will leave you asking more questions than it was likely meant to.

 

Tales from Candleforth is but a single tale from a mystical book the player is invited to read alongside a pumpkin-headed figure, and incidentally, Candleforth isn’t too consequential in its narrative either. This particular story follows Sarah whose grandmother Dorothy has disappeared, the playable prologue hinting at the darker magics at play. While Dorothy had served as Sarah’s guardian and had begun to train her in the ways of magic, the world begins to tear around around her, forcing her to disappear with Sarah having to follow the trail left behind to try and save her. In a rather creative and fun touch, the way reality is disrupted in this hand-drawn world is through the environment tearing like paper. It’s unnatural and represents a surreal distortion well without breaking away from the well-realized aesthetic, there being points elsewhere where you are given a more deliberately creepy sight like distorted facial features or symbols of death but the world tearing like pages in a book feels more inexplicable despite its simplicity and even allows you to peel away parts to view a world beyond at points.

However, what’s on the other side of those tears can feel a bit disconnected from the core story of Sarah and her grandmother. There is the greater mystery of what is happening to Dorothy that is curiously unraveled mostly by the rare optional finds before the narrative itself will look at it head-on near the finale and there are some more interesting clues along the main path that at least get you theorizing, but when you look beyond the rifts in reality, it can feel like you’re being fed unrelated information. You might witness a woman with a flower head on stage or a man with many arms struggling to distribute books to an agitated crowd, but while it feels like there could be meaningful metaphors behind these small scenes, they don’t feel like they tie to the characters that are relevant to this tale. In fact, it might be possible these are sort of the promised Tales from Candleforth represented in abstract, but they mostly seem to serve as puzzles to solve or borderline minigames. Admittedly, once every thing is laid out for the plot it does have some of that fairy tale simplicity with a little wiggle room to interpret a possible moral, but Tales from Candleforth feels like it misleads you in terms of pondering its mystery rather than having more depth to dig into to make solving it satisfying.

 

For most of your interaction as the player though, you’ll be viewing a few small locations in first person, clicking between nearby areas and looking for objects of interest or small puzzles to solve. When a chapter first starts you often need to poke around and find the first puzzle that can currently be solved, the reward for figuring things out often being some bit of information or an object that will allow you to move onto the next one. However, at times it can feel like Tales from Candleforth leans on the same few ideas. Mainly, a good deal of focus is on recognizing symbols and repeating them elsewhere, which is possibly why the game bills itself as having escape room inspired elements. Escape room design can lean a bit more towards the hunt, locating information and identifying where to use it, and these symbols are a pretty common way Tales from Candleforth structures your gameplay. Sometimes recognizing where the symbols are necessary does require an eye for a subtler connection, but often you’ll do something simple like arrange a picture to properly show an image, notice the symbols you need elsewhere, then go over and hopefully input them properly. The symbols are potentially meant to be like magical runes, something that makes them a bit harder to remember, but the game would probably be speedier if they were letters, that not being a suggestion but just an admission that you could probably take notes or screenshots and clear the game more quickly since shape recognition isn’t exactly a compelling test of your problem solving skills.

Tales from Candleforth does have a fair few plain or straightforward puzzles due to its reliance on the symbols, and even some of the more visually engaging ones are often easy once you identify what’s being asked of you. A set of animal bones for example starts off as something with an air of mystery but there’s nothing you can do with them until a bit later, and when you can set about solving their puzzle, it’s almost harder to misinterpret what is being asked of you. However, there is a nice sense of progression that comes from stumbling across a set of mysterious puzzles with no clear solution until you later find the missing piece, running back to solve it now that everything clicked into place. At other points though, the puzzles can feel like they don’t require much thought at all, such as a part where you are placing body parts in a coffin and need them all to fit. You don’t need to think too hard since the smaller pieces can often be put anywhere to make up for sloppiness, and while the macabre idea may be the more important element than the puzzle’s substance, we do run into the fact this game that takes only a couple hours is having less and less substantial puzzles as we notice their little flaws. There are, thankfully, some more substantial obstacles to what otherwise could be quick progression, and the escape room mindset can assist them at times. For example, one puzzle has a range of dolls hanging from a tree, the player needing to notice small details to help them arrange them. The puzzle is a bit tough, but it’s helped by the situation inherently limiting what you consider. On the other hand, there are points like the mirror forest where I got through only by process of elimination since I could not notice any logic to the path required and have found no one online give a suitable explanation for how it is meant to be done.

 

It should also be noted that Tales from Candleforth has a few issues when played on PlayStation 5. During the first chapter where you get to play as Sarah, trying to leave her home at the wrong point will just freeze up the game entirely instead of displaying the message she’s not ready to go, and during the game’s final cutscene the ending stopped animating partway through, giving a weird impression of what the finale was before I investigated the ending online and noticed the issue. This just ends up adding a few more little issues that continue the unfortunate build-up, because while this game being short isn’t an issue itself, it also becomes harder to find parts to point to as a reason to play. The art is excellent for sure, the game able to be uncanny in subtler ways than its moments meant to deliberately shock or disturb, and the moody background music can set a nice tone or pull back to let certain moments feel a bit more uncomfortable as intended. Because it doesn’t go too far in its horror or its puzzle solving complexity it can feel like this is meant to be a creepy story for a younger audience, but it can also feel a bit shallow since it avoids the complications that could give it depth and difficulty.

THE VERDICT: Tales from Candleforth is a bit of a dark children’s fable and probably best enjoyed for the simplicity of it. You get a very nice looking illustrated world with some curious sights and the little eureka moments of realizing how objects and clues make things connect, but the overall mystery is a fairly plain one you’re likely to overthink expecting more of it while the puzzles lean a bit too much on quickly feeling things out or just clicking the symbols you found elsewhere. It has its more creative moments, it sets a general tone really well, but even disregarding PS5 specific problems, Tales from Candleforth is more likely to disappoint than provide interesting payoffs.

 

And so, I give Tales from Candleforth for PS5…

A BAD rating. Tales from Candleforth isn’t egregiously bad, it has an effective aesthetic, a few good puzzles, and some simpler moments of satisfaction or intrigue along its rather short journey. However, the more I looked back on what I played, the more I realized how most of what made playing it interesting was thinking things were building up to more complex puzzles or a compelling mystery. You move through the minigames beyond the paper tears or the symbol codes as you hope for a pay off to visual metaphors and the supernatural elements only for it to fizzle out a bit. Puzzles a bit too often don’t require much thought once you have the necessary information or just require you noticing the right detail, and while the sort of thrill you get from an escape room as you realize something’s importance is hard to deny despite its simplicity, Tales from Candleforth could have better integrated the code entry into a problem to solve rather than having the code or information be the solution on its own. It is fortunate the game does have some puzzles that require some logical deduction or a bit more work to interpret the clues so it’s not just a bunch of busywork, but one reason I made the observation that the symbols could have been replaced with letters and taken away a bit of the challenge is a sort of sense I was just playing a darker version of children’s point and clicks and Pajama Sam or Freddi Fish. You’ve got to think a bit to succeed here and some moments are more about presenting some striking visual than being a touch challenge, but others are so straightforward that I did begin to consider maybe the game didn’t communicate well its intended audience.

 

Tales from Candleforth can be a brisk spooky adventure for a casual gamer or younger player, some puzzles still having a bit of room to stump and some sights perhaps a bit more macabre than the usual focus on being eerie and dark instead of grotesque. The game has a good eye for the specific visual style it wants to bring to life, but other parts come up frequently short so it doesn’t quite deliver on its tone or more creative sights. It is possible, despite just being Sarah’s tale, there will be more Tales from Candleforth one day, this perhaps just a confusingly named start to an anthology, and it would be nice to see the creators be a bit more bold in puzzle and story design if that is the case. For now, this folk horror tale isn’t offensive, but it feels a bit shallow like some of the more forgettable Brothers Grimm fairy tales.